Zoya Fyodorova

Biography

Zoya Alekseyevna Fyodorova was a Russian film star who had an affair with American Navy captain Jackson Tate in 1945 and bore a child, Victoria Fyodorova, in January 1946. Having rejected the advances of NKVD police head Lavrentiy Beria, the affair was exposed resulting, initially, in a death sentence later reprieved to work camp imprisonment in Siberia; she was released after eight years. She was murdered in her Moscow apartment in 1981. The year before Fyodorova was murdered, she appeared in Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, which won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1980.